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Jedediah Purdy calls For Common Things his "letter of love for the world's possibilities." Indeed, these pages--which garnered a flurry of attention among readers and in the media--constitute a passionate and persuasive testament to the value of political, social, and community reengagement. Drawing on a wide range of literary and cultural influences--from the writings of Montaigne and Thoreau to the recent popularity of empty entertainment and breathless chroniclers of the technological age--Purdy raises potent questions about our stewardship of civic values.

Most important, Purdy offers us an engaging, honest, and bracing reminder of what is crucial to the healing and betterment of society, and impels us to consider all that we hold in common.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Jedediah Purdy is only in his mid-20s, but there are times when, working your way through Purdy's precisely crafted sentences, you would swear that the author is an old man. The problem with the world today, Purdy says, is that too many of us have withdrawn from it. "Often it begins in ironic avoidance," he writes, "the studied refusal to trust or hope openly. Elsewhere it comes from reckless credulity, the embrace of a tissue of illusions bound together by untested hope." He urges a revitalization of the notion of public responsibility, "the active preservation of things that we must hold in common or, eventually, lose altogether." Purdy is well aware that politics, the most visible of the public arenas, is nowadays regarded as a training ground for opportunists and hypocrites. But he insists that if we invest our lives with a dignity rooted in "the harmony of commitment, knowledge, and work," even politics might be restored.

For Common Things is quick to make pronouncements along the lines of "Today's young people are adept with phrases that reduce personality to symptoms," without mentioning that it was their therapy-happy baby boomer parents who introduced words like passive-aggressive and repressed into their vocabulary--and without broaching the possibility that it was the combined failure of the '60s counterculture movement and the loss of faith in government attendant to the Watergate scandal that nurtured cynicism and ironic detachment within the boomers. (Well, perhaps solving the problem is more important than assigning the blame.) At times, the Harvard-educated author's erudition gets the best of him, and his prose takes on a certain academic stiffness. (One wonders, at such moments, if perhaps the book has its roots in a senior thesis.) But when Purdy focuses on personal matters related to his homeschooled West Virginia upbringing, one can detect traces of a passion and intensity that would be well worth developing in future writings. Which is not to say that Purdy doesn't feel strongly about the restoration of civic commitment; this book stands as proof that he does. But anybody can--and many people do--make impersonal assessments of the state of the world; there is a story, however, that only Jedediah Purdy can tell us about community and responsibility. The traces of that story in For Common Things may leave many readers clamoring for more details. --Ron Hogan
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

What could a 24-year-old Harvard graduate home-schooled by his "back-to-the-land" parents in rural West Virginia possibly have to say about the American soul? Much that is worth heeding. Purdy calls his book "a defense of love letters," noting that such letters "indicate a certain kind of courage, a willingness to stake oneself on an expression of hope that may very well come to nothing." Here, he expresses his hope for the public life of America. His enemy is the irony that he feels pervades our culture, a culture in which "even in solitary encounters with nature... we reluctant ironists realize that our pleasure in these places and the thoughts they stir in us have been anticipated by a thousand L.L. Bean catalogues." Whether writing about the coal industry's depredations in Appalachia or about the narrowing of politics (no one dares talk about a Great Society anymore), PurdyAlike the masters whose sturdy prose he emulates, from Thoreau to Wendell BerryAdisplays an acute awareness of the connection between private and public virtue. Purdy has an unerring ear for how language, and thus the expression of humanity, has been degraded, whether by political rhetoric, ad-speak or the way that sitcoms present the self. His book is inspiring in its thoughtfulness, in its commitment to the idea that politics should be about more than divvying up the pie and in the care with which it is written. The ideas expressed aren't complicated, but Purdy grapples with them with a seriousness that puts more seasonedAand ironicAcommentators to shame. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Top customer reviews

This book's purpose is to be a wake-up call for all of us who grew complacent to what happens with our society. It tries to explain how our focus on our particular lives, with disregard to politics and social life, affects our society and makes a plea for us to be more involved in society at core levels (politics, education, etc.).Even if it is written more than 10 years ago, it is still actual, not only in American society, but also in nascent democracies, like the ones in Eastern Europe. The author also provides an image of how democracy turned to be after the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe, where only few dissidents stood by and fought for their beliefs, while people just went on with their lives, leading to massive corruption and lawlessness. It should be a warning sign for all those who think that being distant about what happens in politics might keep the status quo, but not being involved as a citizen might lead to power being split only between few.For me it was a good read and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to see the society nowadays through the eyes of a non-ironic and what might be the consequences of non-commitment in social life, even in the most renown and strong democracy in the world.

The ideas in this book are very interesting and give words to the subconscious and formerly unspoken idea of social apathy - in the form of Purdy's ironists. These observations, while not original, are quite well discussed. Purdy is an exemplary expository writer, discussing various very complicated ideas, and addressing in words the emotional undertone of American society. My only criticism is that it is very apparent that Purdy grew up in a small town, in a pastoral farm setting in West Virginia, and was home-schooled. Detachment from the "normal" American experience gives him an outsider's perspective; while I can appreciate his passion against strip-mining for coal in West-Virginia, I can't related. He misses the very relevant reality of American life. Furthermore, I find something ironic in an ivy-league lawyer writing about the American experience of social apathy when his idyllic rearing experience was far removed from the average American's more provincial or urban upbringing. Rather, Purdy comes across as somewhat of an ivy-league elitist that is pedantic in his opinions and naive in his view (but, I mean that in a good way). Understand, that to criticize this book is my highest form of flattery. I am not at all bashing Purdy. I wholly recommend reading this book and encourage more of this form of expression.

Jedediah Purdy's For Common Things goes on my bookshelf waiting for future works of this un-common young man who wrestles and struggles with concepts that are all to often foreign to his peers. At age 24 Mr. Purdy seems to be ready for a trip to China where his disposition towards understanding and optimism would be understood; nurtured and expanded. His fierce talent and passion will evolve over time into something special, I believe. Perhaps the twentysomething crowd up will wear Jedediah's commitment to being visible and active in their community as their new red badge of courage. Less Seinfeld and Wired magazine and more Jedediah Purdy somehow seems like a good thing to kick off the new millennium.

Through Plato's pen, Socrates said that an "unexamined life is not worth living." Now through the earnest words of a recent Harvard graduate, a twenty-four-year-old examines our modern lives and offers us a prescription for what ails us. The ailment is irony, or more finely put, "ironic detachment." Its chief avatar is the television character Jerry Seinfeld, who moves in and out of relationships with all the enthusiasm of a jaded, I've-seen-it-all-and-could-care-less New Yorker, which, of course, he is. Written by Jedediah Purdy, For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today targets an array of cultural arbiters who value cleverness over curiosity, style over substance, self-awareness over social immersion, and, above all, the private over the public. For his efforts, Purdy has reaped scornful reproaches from the very class of ironists he preemptively criticizes. As someone more than twice Purdy's age, I am both amazed and tinged with a bit of envy that a young creature of a West Virginia hollow could possess so much erudition, wisdom, and perspicacity. I dare say that most twenty-four-year-olds could not spell Montaigne let alone quote his magnificent expressions. But Purdy-drawing upon the writings of the 16th-century French essayist; the observations of Tocqueville (which serve as epigraphs in Purdy's book); the philosophies of Kant, Rousseau, and Hegel; the life and words of Wendell Berry; and the profound experiences of Adam Michnik, the brave Polish dissident who retained his integrity as his country succumbed to capitalist rot-urges us to reject ironic detachment in favor of a renewed commitment to the commonweal. Chief among his detractors is Roger D. Hodge, who offered a scathing indictment of Purdy's new book in the September issue of Harper's Magazine. Entitled "Thus Spoke Jedediah: The Distilled Wisdom of a Cornpone Prophet," Hodge, with impatient disdain, says that Purdy belongs to "a line of young Ivy-educated authors whose prose briefly quickened the hearts of the marketing executives who decide which titles will appear at the front of book catalogues, in Barnes & Noble display windows, and on the banner of the Amazon.com home page. And yet how utterly worthless are their books, stacked on remainder shelves in the basements of used-book stores soon after their publication, their notoriety worn thin, their authors' careers all but over." On the contrary, counters Walter Kirn in Time Magazine. "Purdy's book is a precocious diatribe against the sort of media-savvy detachment that passes for intelligence and maturity in the age of Letterman...It is not the accessible pop polemic some reviewers have made it out to be but an achingly ambitious manifesto from a very young man who happens to be, alarmingly often, eloquent beyond his years." Jedediah Purdy was raised on a farm and homeschooled by his parents, mostly his philosophy-trained mother. At the age of 14 he entered New Hampshire's prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy. From there he matriculated at Harvard, where he became "obsessed with ethics," quotes Time. Yet he returned to the family farm at every opportunity to directly experience "the mundane," which, as he reminds us in his book, comes from the Latin mundus-`the world.' He is now studying law and the environment at Yale. In his spare time, it would appear, he writes best-selling manifestoes. What are the "common things" he describes? Essentially they are three "ecologies"-moral, political, and environmental-which are inextricably linked and interdependent. Purdy sets these against our zealous, uncritical embrace of all things private, which, he says, connotes deprivation. He sharply rebukes management guru Tom Peters, who, in his most recent incarnation, champions "You.com," the self as marketed product. (Peters, like his weight, dramatically fluctuates. He used to praise "excellent" corporations for their respect for and involvement of employees. He embraced quality and systems, à la Deming and Juran. A couple of years ago, he recanted. He began to promote virtual companies like Sara Lee, which have a brand name, relatively few officers, a host of products made by others, and no loyalties. Today, Peters proclaims the individual über alles-you are but your résumé, which must constantly be marketed.) The magazines Wired and Fast Company promote greed and self-absorption, argues Purdy. Bill Clinton resorts to facile rhetoric in manipulating public opinion, yet delivers little. Worse, Purdy suggests, the President's hypocritical behavior exquisitely models ironic detachment, feeding the growing cynicism toward public institutions. Purdy, as you have gathered, is a self-proclaimed progressive, acutely concerned for the environment and anxious to improve society. Time writes that "his broader goal is to spur a resurgence in grass-roots public activism." But it's an activism steeped in reason, nurtured by the mundane, and profoundly compassionate. It is not "Promethean," he argues. Rather, it draws on our best public traditions and decides human nature in favor of Rousseau over Hobbes. We would surely profit from more young sages like Purdy and far fewer of what writer Calvin Trillin calls `Sabbath gasbags.' After all, there are very real problems out there that command our urgent attention.* After hearing Purdy on NPR's Morning Edition, I could not resist the image of Ron Howard as Opie. The voice is pure and fresh and innocent. But the words reveal perceptive sagacity. Given his book's nasty reception by the ironists he abhors, Purdy may be deterred from writing another. However, I suspect that he will energetically pursue his overarching goals. And his splendid portfolio should provide this polymath with ample opportunity to make a difference in the world.